"But I won't leave my mudda," he wailed, loudly. "I want to go to jail."
The kindly policeman put his arm about the boy's shoulder.
"You'll go to jail, sonny, when your time comes, if you set the right way to work. Your momma's only going to spend the night, and I'll see to it that you——"
In a side of the room a door opened noiselessly. A woman, wearing a uniform, with a bunch of keys hanging at her side, stood there like a Fate. She was a grave woman, strongly built, and with something inexorable in her eyes. Even the boy guessed who she was, throwing himself against her, and crying out, "Go 'way! go 'way! You won't take my mudda away from me."
But the folly of resistance became evident. The mother herself understood it so. Walking up to the woman with the keys, she said in an undertone:
"For God's sake get me out of this. I can't look on while he breaks his little heart. He's always been an angel."
That was all. She gave no backward look. Before the boy knew what was about to happen, she had passed into a corridor, and the door had closed behind her.
She was gone. He was left with these strange men. The need for being brave was not unknown to him. Not unknown to him was the power of calling to his aid a secret strength which had already carried him through tight places. He could only express it to himself in the words that he mustn't cry. Crying had come to stand for everything cowardly and babyish. He was so prone to do it that the struggle against it was the hardest he had to make. He struggled against it now; but he struggled vainly. He was all alone. Even the three policemen were talking together, while he stood deserted, and futile. His lips quivered in spite of himself. The tears gathered. Disgraced as he was anyhow, this weakness disgraced him more.
The room had an empty corner. Straight into it he walked, and turned his back, his face within the angle. The head with an old cap on it was bowed. The sturdy shoulders, muffled in a cheap top-coat, heaved up and down. But the legs in their knickerbockers were both straight and strong, and the feet firmly planted on the floor. Except for an occasional strangled sound which he couldn't control, he betrayed himself by nothing audible.
The three policemen, all of them fathers, glanced at him, but forbore to glance at one another. One of them tried to say, "Poor kid!" but the words stuck in his throat. It was the kindly fellow who had brought the lad and the woman there who recovered himself first.